Cray on Wednesday introduced its new ClusterStor E1000 highly-scalable storage system, which is designed for next generation exascale supercomputers as well as future datacenters that will require massive storage performance while running converged workloads. The ClusterStor E1000 uses Cray’s new global file storage system as well as a variety of storage media, including all-flash setups and mixes of hard drives and SSDs.

From a hardware point of view, Cray’s ClusterStor E1000 relies on a proprietary highly-parallel internal architecture, which in turn is based around uses purpose-engineered AMD EPYC (Rome)-based PCIe 4.0 system with 24 NVMe U.2 SSDs. The cluster then connects to an external HPC system using Cray’s 200 Gbps Slingshot, Infiniband EDR/HDR, or 100/200 Gbps Ethernet. The key peculiarity of the ClusterStor architecture is its flexibility and scalability: it can use a wide variety of hardware and storage media to offer the a range of different performance and capacity options. The highly-parallel architecture also enables ClusterStor E1000 to be used for converged workloads without any performance degradation.

On the software side of things, the ClusterStor E1000 uses Cray's next-generation global file storage system as well as their ClusterStor Data Services system, which automatically aligns the data flow in the file system with the workflow by shifting I/O operations between different tiers of storage as appropriate. At all times, applications ‘think’ that they are dealing with a high-performance all-flash array, whereas ClusterStor E1000 uses both SSDs and HDDs to offer high-enough levels of performance and maximum storage capacity. The CDS supports scripted, scheduled or policy driven placement of data to provide optimal performance for different workloads.

Cray’s entry-level ClusterStor E1000 will offer about 60 TB of usable capacity while providing around 30 GB/s throughput. When scaled to its highest performance levels, the ClusterStor E1000 will deliver up to 1.6 TB/s sequential read/write speed and up to 50 million IOPS per rack. Clients with more than one rack will naturally get higher performance.

For general customers, Cray’s ClusterStor E1000 systems will be available starting Q1 2020. Pricing will depend on exact configurations. Specially configured ClusterStor E1000 external storage systems will be used by Cray’s upcoming Aurora, Frontier, and El Capitan exascale supercomputers, which will feature over 1.3 ExaBytes of total storage space. Furthermore, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) will use a 30 PB all-flash ClusterStor E1000.

By launching its new ClusterStor E1000 storage platform, Cray concludes a complete redesign of its product portfolio that also encompasses Shasta supercomputers, Slingshot interconnects, and software.

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Source: Cray